Political Realignments 1133

Czechoslovakia alone in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans had
not become a dictatorship between the wars. In the first post-war elections
there in May 1946, Communists won more than a third of the vote. Two
non-Communists, Eduard Benes (1884-1948) and Jan Masaryk (1886­
1948), served as president and foreign minister, respectively, in a coalition
government. But in 1948 the Communists seized power, shutting down other
political parties. Masaryk died after he jumped—or was pushed—from his

office window.

From Moscow, Stalin engineered purges that swept away even loyal party
members in the Eastern European nations. Political arrests in Hungary have
been estimated at 200,000, at 180,000 in Romania, and 80,000 in tiny Alba­
nia. Widely publicized trials (including those of popular Catholic prelates in
Hungary and Czechoslovakia), prison sentences, labor camps, and many exe­
cutions followed. In six years, the Communists in Hungary executed perhaps
a thousand political opponents among the more than 1.3 million people
hauled before tribunals (from a population of 9.5 million). Purges included
not only fascists but many Social Democrats and even Communists thought
to oppose Stalinism. Stalin also tightened Moscow’s grip on the fourteen
non-Russian republics in the Soviet Union, purging “bourgeois nationalists”
in several of them.

The Soviet Union and Its Satellites in the Post-War Era

Rebuilding the Soviet economy after World War II was a monumental task.

After the Soviet Union’s decidedly Pyrrhic victory, those who had managed

to flee the war zones returned to devastated cities. Successive years of har­

vest failure from 1946 to 1947 compounded the extreme suffering. The

highly centralized planning of the fourth Five-Year Plan, which began in

1945, allowed the Soviets to concentrate on key industries like coal and

steel. Soviet planners benefited from the commandeering of industrial

capital goods from Germany and Eastern Europe. Large-scale industrial

production exceeded pre-war levels in 1950 by a comfortable margin,

although such results were only modestly reflected in the quality of life of

Soviet citizens.

Once they recovered from being forced to contribute resources to Soviet

economic growth and from buying Soviet products at inflated prices, the

Communist states of Eastern Europe benefited from Soviet technological

assistance. Yet they were prevented from importing technology from the West

and had to export raw materials and manufactured goods to the Soviet

Union at below market prices. In 1949, the Soviet Union and its Eastern

European allies formed the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, which

sought to coordinate economic planning. Industrial production rose most

rapidly in Eastern Europe in the German Democratic Republic and Czecho­

slovakia. Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia also developed manufacturing

bases.